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Sorry; I was hoping many of you had read it; Letters From Earth is widely reprinted. Also, I was drinking wine while watching election results, to which circumstance I attribute the formatting flaws in my comment (although a preview button would have helped) — had the link worked, you would find that the linked site explains the joke better than I can.

Also, the joke requires a bit of setup, and I am not Mark Twain.

In Official Report to the IIAS, Twain considers a historian’s gloss of a passage from Henry Hudson’s log books, in which several of Hudson’s crewmen report sighting a mermaid

Twain explains that this miracle is as well-attested as any miracle in the historical record, in that it’s supported by concurring testimony from several interested parties. Twain says that this is like accepting the word of a man’s caddy to verify his golf score: this “caddy evidence” has always been accepted as absolutely adequate to establish the truth of a miracle (at least in the minds of those inclined to believe in miracles).

Twain then compares this with the standards of science (which requires independent confirmation by disinterested parties): the historian’s judgement on the mermaid is “probably a seal”, and Twain says that the difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.

And so when the miracle-minded among us report a new miracle, I hear Twain in the back of my mind: “Probably a seal”

Does epistemology teach that facts (the movie) make sense only in the proper (contemporary) context? Probably Charlie Chaplin would have seen little ear trumpets on sale and wouldn’t have thought his own footage remarkable.